Quotes About Chance

as they think that they will beat the odds.

positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them. Many people do not realize that they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it. If

Our operation has a mortality rate of 1%. So far we have operated on ninety-nine patients with great success; you are our one hundreth, hence you have a 100% probability of dying on the table.

If you think that the inventions we see around us came from someone sitting in a cubicle and concocting them according to a timetable, think again: almost everything of the moment is the product of serendipity.

There seems to be no such thing as a foolish decision if it results in profits.

The same applies to the conventional values of persistence, doggedness and perseverance: necessary, very necessary. One needs to go out and buy a lottery ticket in order to win. Does it mean that the work involved in the trip to the store caused the winning? Of course skills count, but they do count less in highly random environments than they do in dentistry.

most successes are caused by very few "windows of opportunity," failing to grab one can be deadly for one's career.

No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry.

Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy.

extreme event as a starting point and not treat it as an exception to be pushed under the rug.

they rarely run into each other.

They will find something he did before when he was successful that he has subsequently stopped doing, and attribute his failure to that. The truth will be, however, that he simply ran out of luck.

in fact, they are so blind to the odds that they treat odds of one in a thousand and one in a million almost in the same way.

Everything nonstable or breakable has had ample chance to break over time.

blinding people to the odds of success when engaging in ventures.

The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform.

Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools—by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure

There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

that a casino was precisely the venue not to pick for such a discussion

One vicious attribute is that the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.

these "computable" risks are largely absent from real life!